New GitHub Extension for Microsoft Visual Studio Has Been Open-Sourced

Jul 20th, 2015 12:15pm by Mark Boyd

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GitHub and Microsoft have today announced they will be open-sourcing the GitHub extension built for Visual Studio 2015.

Since its release in April this year, Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2015 has included a pre-installed extension for GitHub and GitHub Enterprise. The extension lets Visual Studio developers search and instantly clone GitHub repositories from within the Visual Studio IDE and reciprocally, publish Visual Studio projects directly onto GitHub.

Today, GitHub has announced that the extension has been made open source under the MIT license provisions.

The move allows more active participation of the Visual Studio developer community to build on the GitHub extension tool, or to file issues directly.

To encourage open source participation, GitHub’s Brandon Keepers has just released contribution notes, affirming the Open Code of Conduct and proposing a way for developers to contribute. Particular restrictions apply mostly to Visual Studio’s Team Explorer interface, which must maintain few dependencies in order for this part of the extension to maintain its light weight and speed.

This latest release reaffirms Microsoft’s continued moves towards acknowledging the importance of open source tools for developers building on its platform. In October last year, a survey conducted by Saugatuck Technologies for Microsoft found that amongst the 300-plus dev and IT operations professionals interviewed, 52 percent of those working in a Windows environment expect to be using a single DevOps platform that “enables the use of best-of-breed, loosely coupled DevOps tools” by 2016.

The work Microsoft is doing to enable GitHub Enterprise users to access repos from within the Windows dev ecosystem is central to this and demonstrates the move away from locked-in vendor platforms towards enabling devs to integrate open source tools and projects into their workflows.

Feature image: “Dandelions” by opensource.com is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Mark Boyd is a freelance writer for The New Stack and ProgrammableWeb. He's into: API economy, open data, smart cities and tech that helps us interact and connect.